Maemo team released today maemo 4.x Chinook training material. We hope that maemo training courses provide an efficient overview of the tools and methodologies needed when developing applications and platform services to the maemo platform. Courses have been done to be as hands-on style as possible. In practice tis means that there are a lot of exercises and examples how to write simple GUI applications and platform services and how to integrate them into the maemo platform and the packaging framework.

More information about maemo training material, course material itself and instructions how maemo community can contribute to the training material creation can be found from official maemo training pages and maemo community wiki pages.

This time we announced following three maemo training courses for maemo 4.x Chinook:

maemo Getting Started
– introduction to the maemo platform and setting up environment
– can be used (if needed) at the beginning of Application and Platform
Development training sessions
– planned to be 1 day class room course
– course content as html is available here

maemo Application Development
– introduction to maemo application development on top of maemo platform
– maemo Getting Started as prerequisite
– can be used (together with Getting Started) as independent training material
– planned to be 3 day class room course
– course content as html is available here

maemo Platform Development
– introduction to maemo platform and service development
– maemo Getting Started and Application Development as prerequisite
– can be used (together with Getting Started) as independent training material
– planned to be 2 day class room course
– course content as html is available here

In near future we plan to announce also one more course e.g.
maemo Technology Overview
– overview of technologies used in maemo platform and development environment
– can be used together or separate with other maemo courses
– planned to be 1 day lecture type course

Last time I introduced sp-error-visualizer and sp-rich-core. Now it’s time to take a look at a couple of the other sp-tools in Chinook.

sp-endurance

The sp-endurance suite provides tools to save and analyze data from endurance testing. Endurance testing could be defined as repeated testing over a long(er) period of time. This kind of testing usually reveals memory and resource leaks. Due to the nature and requirements of endurance testing, it is usually done once the application is nearly complete. In my opinion it is one of the most important steps when moving from beta to release quality.

The sp-endurance suite consists of two packages; sp-endurance and sp-endurance-postproc. The first one is meant to be installed on the device and provides helper scripts for data collection. The second one provides data post-processing tools for data manipulation and report generation and it’s meant to be used on the PC.

You still need to do the hard work of actually designing and executing the endurance tests, sp-endurance is there to help you analyze the results. The Chinook toolset also contains some tools for test automation and you could consider using those when designing your test cases.

sp-stress

Ever wondered how your program behaves under a heavy CPU load or how it handles itself when memory is low or unavailable? sp-stress provides you with utilities to easily put the system under different kinds of stress and thus let you test your application in these scenarios.

The sp-stress package provides three utilities; cpuload, ioload and memload. Their names are already indicative of their purpose.

cpuload will generate the given background CPU load, which you can select from 1% to 100% or have it generated randomly.

ioload will perform read and write operations on a given file generating a lot of I/O load on the filesystem.

memload will allocate a given megabyte size chunk of memory.

Depending on your program, it may be a good idea to test how it behaves with a constant or varying load of one or more of the sp-stress utilities.

More about tools

See maemo.org for usage examples and to learn more about these and other tools:

The maemo workshops held in Copenhagen, Beijing, Shanghai, Palo Alto and Boston in the last couple of months were an exciting experience at least for me. The slides from the presentations are finally available at maemo.org. I wish to thank all the participants on my behalf, let’s keep in touch!